Originally Posted by Schlack
Originally Posted by Ardy
Every rich country has illegal immigration problems. My wife lived for a while on Cyprus. They have an illegal immigration problem. One would be hard pressed to connect that reality to their foreign policy or their corporate multinationals.
one would not be pressed at all, its a gateway into the rest of the EU for one, and for two Europe has been exploiting Africa for generations in the exact same manner as the US companies. its pretty similar ardy.

Schlack...
the argument proposed by others (as I understand it) is that nations (particularly the USA) have acted as international economic predators and for this reason poverty was caused; and for this reason illegal immigration is caused into the predator countries. (Correct my statement of the argument if I have it wrong)

I do agree that various rich countries have had economically predatory policies. But, it think it is not self evident that ALL poverty in the world emerges only from such policies.

Further, I say that poor people tend to want to migrate to rich countries regardless of their history of economic predation. Cyprus is only one of many possible examples. And I can assure you that there are a great number of poor people that will be very happy to move to Cyprus and never use it as a gateway to anywhere else. In particular, there are people trying to get to Cyprus from Ukraine, Romania and Bulgaria. In each case there are "gateways to Europe " that are much more convenient than Cyprus. Among other things, the fact that Cyprus is an Island makes "gateway" travel much more difficult than is the case with a geographically contiguous country.

Originally Posted by Schlack
Originally Posted by Ardy
Yes, but when people use US foreign policy as a justification to support illegal immigration, then I see no basis to distinguish one undocumented immigrant from any other.
i don't follow. could you please explain this?

If you read other posting in this thread, you will see that various posters have referred to US foreign policy as somehow connected with the topic of illegal immigration. And the inferential tone of these posting is that since we have ruined their countries and made them poor, then the very least we can do in fairness is to accept them as immigrants so that they can attempt to reclaim their lives.

I am saying that once you start down this path of justification, I can see no means by which to reject any immigrant. And for this reason, to advocate this argument seem to me to be advocating unlimited immigration.

Originally Posted by Schlack
Originally Posted by Ardy
And in this context, it seems that the argument is indistinguishable from proposing open borders.
What's the worst that could happen?

Perhaps someone else who has opposed open borders could take up a response to this question. For my part, I was simply explaining my previous remarks about the subject. Remarks which prompted some posters to deny that anyone had supported such a policy. I was explaining that I feel that indirectly they had in fact implicitly supported open borders. And now it seems that you explicitly support that policy.

What ever the virtues any of us may see in the open border policy, it seems to have vanishingly small political support and in that sense is only tangentially relevant to the discussion.

"It's not a lie if you believe it." -- George Costanza
The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves. --Bertrand Russel